Perhaps not surprisingly in a highly centralised system of government, there was a great deal of consistency between the messages of the three leaders. The core refrain was as follows: this is a nasty crisis; it has been caused overseas; we are well placed to weather the storm; we are doing everything we can to enhance business competitiveness, but we have to accept that our dependence on our major trading partners’ economies is overwhelming; as long as they are in recession, we will face significant uncertainty and unemployment; but we cannot allow this to diverge us from our tried and tested approach to creating long-term prosperity.

In the majority of speeches analysed in this chapter, the speakers directed the cause and responsibility towards the United States as the origin of the global financial crisis. Further to this, with varying degrees of explicitness, they lamented the failure of US legislators and regulators to diagnose and manage the health and viability of its financial markets and banking system. Heng even expressed some doubt about the United States’ ability to fully recover—alluding to possible long-term changes in the world order, the substance of which might become clear only after the global financial crisis and its effects had fully dissipated.

Singapore has been known as the financial and business hub of East Asia. With the pride of the nation hinging on its commercial success and high standard of living, economic crises pose an existential threat to this small city-state. In what could be construed as an attempt to regain consumer confidence and confidence in its leaders, the most prominent hallmark of the three key actors’ crisis framing was the propensity to deflect blame—mostly towards foreign governments and organisations, but also, to a lesser extent, to naive domestic investors and misconduct within some domestic financial institutions.

Though comparatively small, some differences in tone and emphasis are notable. Lee’s unflinching optimism about Singapore’s capacity to weather the storm was not fully met by Shanmugaratnam and Heng, who were more inclined to stress the fragility of the situation (while sharing Lee’s staunch defence of the government’s past and present economic policies). Overall, however, the impression one gets is that whether spontaneously or by purposeful coordination, the speeches all served the same underlying purpose: to consolidate and strengthen the PAP’s political capital and at the same time advance and defend longstanding PAP policies. On this line, the PAP has, arguably, successfully turned a crisis situation into an opportunity to implement pragmatic, and perhaps otherwise unacceptable, policies that will redirect and reshape Singapore’s business community in ways that fit the PAP’s vision for the future of Singapore.

At the same time, the proactive attitude shown by the PAP in its attempts to buffer Singapore from the worst of the effects of the global financial crisis might not have been for purely pragmatic purposes. With Prime Minister Lee often being accused of attaining his position through nepotism, the global financial crisis might have come at a good time for him to prove himself as being as indispensable to Singapore as Lee Kuan Yew had been, and that the PAP’s role in Singapore society was still viable and not yet redundant. Even in a ‘managed democracy’ political leaders must, to a considerable extent, accept the discipline of public criticism and social opposition (Dreze and Sen 1989).

In their meaning-making efforts with regard to the global financial crisis, the ruling party injected their values into their depiction of the situation and their narratives of severity, causality and responsibility. Whether Lee’s or the PAP’s private sense making coincided with their public pronouncements remains unclear. With the memory of the 1997 East Asian financial crisis and Singapore’s vigorous and largely successful response to it still looming large in their own (and, presumably, the Singaporean public’s) minds, they might have believed their own, self-confident rhetoric. Politically, barring a total economic collapse, it is unlikely that there will be any significant paradigm shift or substantial damage to the long-term image of the Lee family or the PAP as a result of this crisis.